Maxwell Cavaseno: Ego left to its own designs tells us all that we can do whatever we want. Jared Leto is a guy who, thanks to pretty great fortune on facial symmetry and some decent placements in early ’00s films that in retrospect he didn’t do all that much in, made many people think that Thirty Seconds to Mars could in fact be a good band. Several albums in, that hasn’t happened, and if anything, Leto and his band of cronies have just managed to fulfill the obligation of providing the most banal forms of pompous anathema that people have been taught to depend on for release. Like his career prestige (which when you look over, was revealing itself as a sham long before the tooth-decay aftertaste of that Joker run), Leto’s band seems to have to be a success to justify its own existence. For every rock band who may deserve to get savaged on occasion, they are in their own ways PROBABLY more appreciable than Thirty Seconds, who are simply designed to be a band that looks more important than it really is. You could listen to “Walk on Water” 200 times and the fact remains, you’d never discover an element that isn’t plainly apparent on the first skim. This is not a band who exist to be holy, but a band who drowns you in formaldehyde to cover up how hollow and rotten they’ve been the moment they assumed their mantle. It’s gruesome.[0]

Thomas Inskeep: Almost every single line of this song is a cliche, or sounds like one, and they’re paired with plodding, Imagine Dragons-esque “rock.” Jared Leto over-emotes just as much as a singer as he does as an actor. And really guys, a massed choir just to drive your point (such as it is) home? Ugh.[2]

Tara Hillegeist: Stealing concepts from Jesus didn’t improve their chances of impressing me any more than stealing from George Clooney did; if anything, four years’ time only makes the schtick seem even more perversely grotesque. “Walk on Water” is nothing more than “Centuries” with even muddier but no less cliff-faced mixing. Someone’s been sticking their hands into Fall Out Boy’s trashcans for leftovers; doesn’t sound like they saved anything edible in there for the rest of us.[1]

Alex Clifton: A song that tries its darnest to be sweeping, but I’m not swept away. There’s something oddly empty about it–it’s not merely the fact that it sounds like a cheap Imagine Dragons knock-off (which would make it really cheap), but for a “political” song there’s no soul to this. When P!nk and Coldplay released more political tunes this summer, both of them had a modicum of feeling where, just for a moment, you can sense the spark within them. For all the bombastic, anthemic production on this track, which I’d normally love, I don’t even know what Jared Leto’s supposed to be selling. “Times are changing.” How? I mean, yes, they are, but there’s no sense here as to whether or not things are changing for better or worse, making this into an apolitical bland “patriotic” anthem. Leto has won an Academy Award, but you wouldn’t believe it here: he’s reading from a script without understanding the words.[2]

Stephen Eisermann: If you’re going to take a stab at making a political song, make sure it says something, otherwise you’re left with weird smorgasbord of guitar licks, electronic sounds, and screaming. Take, for example, this song! [3]

Alfred Soto: If Thirty Seconds aren’t addressing a politician (hmm I wonder who), then it behooves them to stop the equivocating bullshit. Answer your own rhetorical questions. Don’t rely on the distorted choir or power chords. And stop yelling.[2]

Katherine St Asaph: Warring factions: my disdain for the disdain heaped upon every actress with a music career while the industry just lets Jared Leto Bono away, versus my latent weakness for this minor-key synthy buzziness, versus the video featuring all the cutting-edge technology that was already dated when The World is Not Enough used it for a cheap joke, versus my suspicion that the political message is so incoherent because all Leto wants to say are the things that sound cool in a lyric. (The only thing keeping this from “Call the Police” both-sides-are-bad, I suspect, is that “far right” is phonetically easier to sing than “far left.”) [4]

Will Adams: Hard to believe that injecting “Radioactive” with pat protest actually counts as an improvement, yet here we are.[4]